Children's burial ground, Coonagh West, Co. Limerick

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Burial Grounds

Children’s burial ground, Coonagh West, Co. Limerick

Tucked between a farm laneway and the driveway of a private dwelling in Coonagh West, County Limerick, a small oblong patch of green carries a weight that its modest dimensions do not immediately suggest.

It is a cillin, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground used for unbaptised infants, a category of the dead who, under Catholic theological tradition, could not be interred in hallowed ground. These sites are scattered across the Irish countryside in their hundreds, often unmarked and easily overlooked, occupying the margins of fields, the edges of ancient ringforts, or, as here, the narrow spaces between working farm infrastructure and domestic life.

The site appears on the 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it is drawn as a rectangular area measuring approximately seventeen metres west-northwest to east-southeast and eleven metres north-northeast to south-southwest, defined by a perforated line and labelled simply 'Children's Burial Gd.' By the time the revised twenty-five-inch Ordnance Survey map was produced in 1938, the depiction had shifted somewhat: the shape is rendered as triangular rather than rectangular, with slightly larger dimensions, and the name had become 'Infants' Burial Ground'. Whether this reflects actual changes to the boundary, differences in surveying method, or simply the cartographic conventions of the two editions is not clear from the record. What is notable is that the site was considered significant enough to be named and mapped across nearly a century of survey work. More recently, aerial photography has confirmed the ground's history in a different way: Digital Globe orthophotos taken between 2011 and 2013, and a Google Earth image from June 2006, both show a cropmark, a subtle variation in vegetation caused by subsurface disturbance, outlining a rectangular area oriented along an east-southeast to west-northwest axis.

The site sits on private land, bounded to the southwest by a farm laneway and to the north by the driveway of a dwelling, so access is not straightforward and permission from landowners would be necessary before visiting. There are no markers visible from the public road to indicate what the green area contains. For those interested in the archaeology of vernacular burial practice, the cropmark evidence is itself telling: it suggests that beneath the surface, the boundary of the original rectangular enclosure remains intact even where the mapped outline has changed over the decades. The record was compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded in June 2020 as part of ongoing efforts to document these often-forgotten places before the landscape absorbs them entirely.

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